LynnS
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Registered: 10-2008
Posts: 1501
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Dissatisfaction: The Holy Grail
Titurel Receives the Grail and Spear, oil painting by Franz Stassen
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"It's Never Enough, It's Never Right, and It's All Your Fault!"
The narcissist's world is a wasteland of perpetual and internal dissatisfaction projected outward. For those with NPD, it seems their life is an endless quest: the proverbial search for the Holy Grail. The N seeks and searches relentlessly to fill the hole which can never be filled. Each new conquest turns to a less-than-satisfying answer after a time, and the old dissatisfaction rears its head once again, setting him free to search for that which he can never find.
It is not your responsibility as a target to fill that hole or to bring an end to his searching. This is the Narcissist's quest for 'self', a quest that will never result in abatement of the yearning because the self he seeks to satisfy and reaffirm is a false one, and he is looking outwardly to affirm it. You cannot transform him into 'more of a him' by becoming 'more of a you'. He only wishes that were true since it would relieve him of all responsibility for himself. He will likely keep searching for the answer to his dissatisfaction for the rest of his days.
You are not his elusive Holy Grail. It doesn't exist for the Narcissist, at least not outside of himself. I suspect he knows that; in fact, I also suspect that he truly never wants to find that Grail. That would take work, introspection, and accountability. He simply continues to search for it 'out there', perpetually wanting and continually failing to find the answer. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, providing an excuse, an explanation for the emptiness, and someone else to blame for the shame he cannot own.
The hoops he may have held and the bars he likely set for you are what I refer to as 'emotional gymnastics'. At first, perhaps you were showered with praise for being so very able to navigate this routine. With time, the hoops got smaller, the bar got higher, encouraging you to keep trying harder and harder to jump. Once you did, the goal likely changed, perhaps even retroactively. Suddenly, it was you. With a narcissist, you are set up to fail.
There will never be anyone who is emotionally 'athletic' enough to satisfy the Narcissist. The next target won't be his answer going forward and you weren't the source of his dissatisfaction looking back. You didn't 'make him' unhappy. He just is. Perpetually.
By Lynn
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Quotes About the Story of The Holy Grail and The Search for Meaning
From: http://www.menweb.org/woundedmasc.htm
quote:
"If man remains in the old mentality of seeking the solution only in the exterior world or blaming something outside of himself then he cannot be healed and dooms himself to loneliness and emptiness within!"
Various quotes from: http://scholarisland.org/grail.htm
quote:
"The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. That is the Wasteland. And that is what T.S. Eliot meant in his poem the Waste Land."
Joseph Campbell
"Read a typical modern novel and you will find that it revolves around the subject of the lostness and the loneliness of the alienated man. It is, the great subject now, for we are all Fisher Kings. You have only to walk down the street and look at the faces to see the countenance of the Fisher King. We are all wounded, and it shows."
Robert Johnson
"The legends of the Grail have an enthralling atmosphere of mystery, of some tremendous secret which stays tantalizingly just outside the mind's grasp, in the shadows beyond the edge of conscious awareness. The outlines of the secret become clearer as writer after writer takes up the theme and makes his own sense of it, but we are never told in plain language exactly what the Grail means....The inner mystery of the Grail cannot be explained, because it is "that which the heart of man cannot conceive nor the tongue relate..."
Richard Cavendish
From The Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes http://www.mcelhearn.com/perceval.html
quote:
"Individuation can be seen as the realization of self. It is the coming to terms with our inner world, and its unification. And it is the realization that as individuals we are different from the world around us, and that we can become unique. The Grail quest is a search for that undescribable uniqueness that is within all of us."
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/26/2008, 1:52 pm
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